


The King of Hurt/Comfort

by blythechild



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Caretaking, Confusion, Everyone Needs A Hug, Fanfiction, Fluff, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Misunderstandings, Ouch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 22:37:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11541861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/pseuds/blythechild
Summary: Reid unwittingly acquires a skill from fan fiction.This is a work of fanfiction and as such I do not claim ownership over the characters herein. It was created as a personal amusement. This story is suitable for all readers.





	The King of Hurt/Comfort

“Hey,” he calls out while squinting at something on his monitor. “Have you ever heard of something called ‘Hurt/Comfort’?”

She blinks. “I understand those words separately, not hyphenated.”

“It’s a forward slash actually.”

“Nope, that doesn’t clarify anything, Reid.”

“Hmmm,” he considers the screen some more.

“What are you looking at?” She swivels her chair around to get a peek at his computer after a seemingly endless amount of staring. Now she’s curious.

“I’m thinking of clicking…” he mumbles to himself.

“Is that…” She can’t process it. “Is that… _fan fiction?_ You read fan fiction??”

He shoots her a glare that actually makes her roll her chair back a step. “Doctor Who fiction. Yes. Some of it is very well done.” He goes back to the document onscreen. “But I don’t understand what ‘Hurt/Comfort’ is. It’s probably… _relationship-y._ ”

“Well, it seems like you’ll only figure it out if you try it, Reid. Better click the link.” Emily shrugs and rolls back to her desk trying not to reveal that her brain is exploding from this. She sends a quick, hysterical IM to Garcia about it – she needs to spread the insanity. “If you get sucked into an internet black hole of tentacle porn, don’t blame me.”

“I’m an adult, you know.” She can _feel_ him rolling his eyes at her. And then he mumbles, “And I don’t mess with hentai.”

She suspects he does (and makes a note to discuss it with Garcia RIGHT. NOW.), but whatever.

\----

Morgan flops down into a creaky chair beside him in the Baltimore PD. He looks terrible because he tackled someone much bigger than himself. He was victorious – he always is – but there was a lot of wrestling and punching before that happened. Reid blinks at him and waits.

“Hey, what’s up?” he asks finally when Morgan just stares at him.

“I have a sliver.” Morgan holds up his hand to show a bloody scratch. If Reid focuses enough, there _might_ be something there…

“So?”

“Take it out.”

“What?” Morgan is bruised and bloody and inexplicably covered in sawdust, but he can’t handle a sliver? Reid glances around to see if he’s being punked or something.

“C’mon, Reid, help me out. I’m in pain here.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Don’t you care?”

“Of course I car-”

“I’m hurt. Take care of me.” Morgan shoots him a pleading expression that seems genuine. Reid looks around him again to confirm that no one is filming this, and he lurches up from his seat and heads for where the officers keep the first aid kit.

“For the record,” he grumbles as Morgan follows him through the squad room. “You’re a wuss. And I never believed I’d ever utter that sentence to you under any circumstance.”

When Reid tweezes out the sliver in the men’s room and Morgan yelps and then asks for a hug, Reid gets the satisfaction of doing something else he doesn’t normally do – playfully telling Morgan to ‘fuck off’. Morgan laughs and declares that’s better than a hug.

And then Reid hugs him anyway, because hugs are awesome and the sliver was sorta big and it might have actually hurt a little.

\-----

He wanders into Garcia’s lair holding copies of the files she sent him. He doesn’t look up right away – he’s too preoccupied with figuring out why he’d need a thousand pages about twenty-year-old art heists from New York City.

“Garcia, I’m not sure what these are for… Did I ask for art-”

He glances at her when he hears sniffling and she twitches and hides her face quickly.

“What’s that, Slim Jim?” She tries to make her voice light and peppy like always but only gets halfway there.

“Garcia, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Garcia…”

“Nope. Not at work. There’s no crying at the FBI…” But then she bursts into tears and he’s frozen in place with both his files and his brain being absolutely no help to anyone.

Finally, his body just reacts as he places the files down, crouches next to her chair and swivels her to face him. “Penelope, what happened? Please don’t cry, please… Just tell me. You’re gonna make me cry too and I don’t even know what we’re crying about.”

This just makes her sob even louder and launch herself at him so that he has to stumble back on bent ankles to handle a lapful of weepy tech analyst. He holds her close, rubbing her back and tries to stave off his own sniffles. A sad Garcia can throw your whole world out of alignment.

“Kevin left me,” she hiccups into his shoulder. He curses and hugs her closer. “He’s already seeing someone new.”

“What a jerk,” he says beneath his breath.

She pulls back, face blotchy and mascara running. “You don’t know… maybe it’s temporary… maybe he’ll change his mind…”

“Pen,” he cups her face. “He left you because he thought someone else might be better. But there’s _no one_ better than you. Period. If he didn’t know that after all this time, then he’s a jerk, and that won’t change even if he changes his mind.”

Her face creases up and she sobs loudly, collapsing back into his grasp. Oh dear. He thought that would have helped, but…

“God, you really are good at this…” she says wetly.

“Good at what?”

“I’m glad you found me. I was waiting for Honey Bear, but… this is better.”

He doesn’t know what he’s managed to do that seems so magical, but he’s proud of himself nonetheless. He decides to test the boundaries of this newfound mystery skill.

“Wanna get something sugary? My treat. We can talk about Kevin… or, or not. We could talk about kittens, or something… pink maybe… Whatever you want.”

“Sure.” She leans back and smiles shyly, wiping her face. “That actually sounds great. Thank you.”

“Any time, Penelope. You know that.”

They both stand, she smooths her dress, and then they leave in search of caffeine, his inexplicable files forgotten on her desk as he wraps an arm around her shoulders.

\-----

Reid sees the light on in Hotch’s office and decides that since it’s afterhours he might have some time to discuss Reid’s latest collection of case studies that he’s hoping to turn into a paper. He hates to bother Hotch – the man already has so much to do – but a second opinion before he gets too stuck into the idea would be invaluable. 

He knocks on the doorframe but doesn’t wait for an invitation before walking in. It takes him a moment to realize how dark it is in Hotch’s office, even with his desk light on. And when he glances at his desk, the man isn’t there.

“Hotch?”

“Here.”

There’s a shadowy lump stretched out over Hotch’s sofa at the opposite end of his office. Is Hotch… lying down?

“Are you sick?” Reid is suddenly nervous. A less than perfectly-pressed Hotch is worrisome.

“No.”

Reid walks over to the couch and looks down at his boss who makes no attempt to sit up. “What are you doing?”

“Lying here. Looking up. Sometimes I look to the side.”

Reid wants to roll his eyes, but it’s Hotch so he fights the impulse. “ _Why_ are you lying on the couch looking up?”

“It turns out couches are ideal for this sort of thing.”

Okay, the man gets an eyeroll for that. Reid sighs and then squats down sitting on the edge of the coffee table facing the sofa.

“I thought I was the obtuse one. I’m gonna need a little more, Hotch.” He blinks, has a doubt, remembers who he’s talking to. “Unless, you know, you don’t want to… or can’t ‘cause it’s… not my business or something…”

“It’s fine, Reid,” Hotch huffs and shifts to look at him in the gloom. “My ear was bothering me, so I decided to lie down. While I was here, I was thinking… I’m considering retiring.”

“Wow,” Reid tries not to gasp but it’s a little obvious.

“I know.”

“It’ll be… so different.”

“For everyone, yes.” Hotch sounds tired. Reid considers that, thinks about all of the ways Hotch _expects_ people to react to the news.

“Could be great though.”

Hotch rustles against the couch and Reid can feel him waiting for more.

“You’re good at a lot of things – things that you don’t get much time to indulge in this job. It might be an incredible opportunity. And then there’s Jack. You could be with him so much more. Do family stuff together.” Reid thinks for another moment and then the ideas come quickly. “You could be an instructor at the Academy, or write a book like Rossi. But’s let’s face it – yours would be better. He uses too many adverbs and hyperbole. Or you could practice law… oh! Maybe you could be part of the Bureau’s legal arm! They could probably use someone like you, with your knowledge of how the other side works. Sometimes it feels like those people are just phoning it in… Or politics-”

“No politics.”

“Um, okay, no politics. But maybe advocacy? You have all these people management skills and PR knowledge and the profiling thing has got to be great for a tiny bit of manipulation… if you got behind a cause you really believed in-”

“She was right,” Hotch mumbles and it silences Reid. “I thought she was joking.”

“Who was right? Who was joking?”

“Emily.” He doesn’t elaborate. “I was lying here thinking about how retirement would be _the end_ , and then you sit down with half a dozen ideas for how it’s not within the space of a minute. You really can be… quite soothing, Reid.”

“T-thank you?” He’s never been accused of that before.

Hotch just stares for a minute. “What did you come in here for anyway?” he asks eventually and then sits up.

“Nothing. It can wait.”

“Reid…”

“Umm, well, I have a bunch of case studies that I was thinking of combining into a paper on borderline personality disorder, and I wanted to run it past you to see what you thought. You know, theoretically, legally, etc.”

“Sounds like just my kind of thing.” Hotch stands and reaches for his suit jacket along the ridge of the sofa. “Wanna get a drink and fill me in?”

“Really? It seems like you’ve got a lot to think about just now.”

“One good turn deserves another, Reid. We can probably cover a multitude of topics in one sitting. And I hate talking or thinking about myself for too long.” He slaps Reid on the back and directs him towards the door. It’s a little authoritative and a little not. Reid just rolls with it and makes a ‘hmmm’ noise.

They’re halfway to the elevators when Reid reviews what they’ve already said.

“What did Emily say about me exactly?”

Hotch shrugs and gives him a tiny smile. “She called you the ‘King of Hurt-Comfort’.”

\-----

She was dead, but now she’s not. He’s confused, exhausted, elated, and absolutely livid with her. He cried for months. _Months._ Does she realize that? It’s like something out of bad fiction: faking your death and then coming back to spook and piss off all your friends. Who _does_ that? Who calls themselves a responsible adult and thinks that’s a plan that’ll work in real life? She’s supposed to be his friend. Friends don’t hurt each other this way on purpose. He hates her, but he won’t tell her that. Hate is too close to something else he doesn’t want to look at closely, and he doesn’t want her getting the wrong idea about him. Not yet, anyway. But then she’s in the hallway outside his apartment and she looks like she’s been crying.

“I’m really sorry,” she whispers, as if she doesn’t trust herself to be louder. He just glares at her from the doorway. It’s one thing to act indifferent at work, but it’s another thing when she hunts him down and invades his privacy. He might not be able to control his anger, and the thing it’s masking.

“Fine. You’re sorry. Great,” he snaps, and then feels bad about it. “I’m sorry too, I guess…”

She stares at him long enough that he has to look somewhere else if he wants to stay angry. Her expression is sorta… gut-wrenchingly deconstructed, and the longer he looks at it without her saying anything, the more his anger fizzles inside him. He has to stay angry. It’s _important_.

“Listen… this is a bit of a ballsy thing to ask considering…”

He looks at her again and she is beyond hesitant. 

“But… I could really use a hug right now.”

“A hug?” He can’t believe what he’s hearing. He should just shut the door on her.

“Yeah. Everyone’s so angry with me – and they have every right to be. _You_ have every right, Reid. But it’s been a _really_ tough eight months. Like, punishing. And I’m sorta not okay. You can go back to hating me tomorrow – I don’t mind – but right now I’d really like a hug from someone who isn’t about to murder me.”

He just stares for a really long time, and she lets him. It’s disconcerting to be infuriated and empathetic at the same time. Not to mention it’s inconvenient.

“You’re pretty good at hugs,” she adds feebly, and that’s the thing that breaks him. He pulls her into his chest and rests his chin along her shoulder.

“I’m not making any implicit promises that I won’t murder you while I’m doing this,” he growls.

“Understood.” She squeezes him tight and tries to hide her wet response in his collar. “Thank you.”

“You are too much, Emily,” he sighs damply and closes his eyes, enjoying this despite his best intentions to be volcanically enraged until the end of time. “This is too much.”

“Yeah, I know,” she hiccups. “But I had to come here. I had to try.”

“Why?”

She pulls back and gives him a small smile. “Because you’re the King.”

He shakes his head and tells himself _‘don’t smile back’._ “I’m aware of that rumor you started. You know that’s NOT what Hurt/Comfort means, right?”

“Well, I know that _now_ … But you gotta admit that you took whatever was thrown at you even if everyone else made the same mistake I did. It turns out you’re pretty good at it.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” He pulls her in again and rocks them back and forth a little. She’s right: he can be angry tomorrow. Right now, this is what he needs too. “You shouldn’t test the limits of the title though.”

“I won’t,” she breathes. “Never again. I’d miss this too much if I did.”

“Hmmmm,” he intones, and then just gives into the soft creaking of the floorboards beneath them as they sway gently. They hold each other for a while in his doorway and it’s fine. Better than fine. She has a ways to go in order to make it all up to him, but he knows that ‘Hurt’ doesn’t have much of a purpose without ‘Comfort’.


End file.
